Oh, Mama Mia!

Cher and Bob Mackie Will Reunite for the Broadway Musical About Her Life

There are, in the world, classic pairings, two items that defy the sum of their parts when coupled. Two things that become more themselves when walking through this world together. Peanut butter and jelly, for example. Cheese and crackers. Cacio e pepe. Other ones that aren’t even food-based, like Cher and Bob Mackie, an icon and her iconic costumer. Who would the Queen of Comebacks be without re-invention expert the Sultan of Sequins? Who would she have become without that 1986 Oscars ensemble, or her gravity-defying feather headpieces, or all those creative ways of being naked while dressed? Who would Cher be without Mackie?

That’s a great question, and thankfully not one that the The Cher Show, a forthcoming bio-musical about the singer, will have to answer—because Mackie is doing the costumes. The production has not announced who will have the privilege and the responsibility of playing Cher from childhood on (no word if her cameo in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again will be covered), but we can confirm that the performer will at least look the part. Over nearly 50 years of dressing the star for this television show and that Vegas residency, for this Oscars ceremony and that stage show, nobody knows how to make a Cher look her Cher-iest like Mackie. He told Entertainment Weekly, “Thirty gazillion outfits later, the lady is about to be immortalized in a musical, for which I am delighted to be designing. Darling, my sketchpad is ready!”

It’s going to take someone special to fill the costumes out, though. As Mackie told Vanity Fair in 1990, “When we design the costumes for her, it has nothing to do with fashion. It has nothing to do with anything but the fact that we are attempting to present to the world this . . . creature in her own right.”

Twenty years later, he told V.F.’s Krista Smith, there’s no one quite like Cher: “She’s a chameleon, but you never lose her. You put a blonde wig on her and you still see Cher. Forty years ago everyone thought, ‘Oh, she’s so strange, so weird, so big and gawky.’ Well, I saw a beautiful little girl and thought, ‘I can work with that.’ That became part of the attraction of the television show: how naked was she going to be?” And she pushed him, too. When asked if they ever went too far, he said, “Oh, I’ve said it many times. But, you know, the lady gets what the lady wants.”

Chicago’s Oriental Theatre will host the performance from June 12 through July 15, and it’s scheduled to arrive on Broadway this fall.

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